7/17/2009 @ 5:31PM

A Bad Day For ObamaCare

President Barack Obama seems to think so. How else to explain the unusually forceful language and defensive tone of a late afternoon press conference at the White House Friday?

“Those who are betting against this happening this year are badly mistaken,” he said. “We are going to get this done.”

Obama wants both chambers of Congress to pass health care legislation before lawmakers’ August recess, but the past 24 hours have been particularly damaging to that effort.

Six moderate senators sent their chamber’s leadership a letter Friday urging them to “resist timelines” that might prevent them from achieving the best reform possible. “This opportunity is rare and the impact will last for generation,” said the letter, which was signed by Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., Mary Landrieu, D-La., Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

On Thursday, Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf told a Senate panel that a bill currently sailing through the House of Representatives would damage the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook–exactly the opposite of what the president hopes to achieve.

Elmendorf’s comments seemed to vindicate what some business groups and nearly all Republicans have been arguing, particularly since Tuesday when House leaders introduced their bill–that reform is going to drive up costs. (See: “ObamaCare: The Cost Cutting Delusion.”) In less than a week, the bill, which largely pays for health care reform by raising taxes on the rich, has cleared two key congressional committees already.

Next stop: the Senate Finance Committee, which is expected to unveil its plans to pay for health care overhaul. It is likely to be an alphabet soup of proposals, unlike the House’s version. Friday, the president said emphatically: “Health insurance reform cannot add to our deficit over the next decade, and I mean it.”

But he’s clearly rattled by the ferocity and speed of the opposition. Obama said he “wanted everybody to just step back for a moment and look at the unprecedented progress” that’s been made so far on reform efforts. He mentioned commitments to savings by hospitals and drug manufacturers as well as recent endorsements by the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association.

“Now we’ve got to get over the finish line and part of this process is figuring out how to pay for it,” the president said. In Washington, that’s always the messy part.